The goal of this research is to explore the biomedical aspects of the social and economic life of the countryside of the Paris basin in the 18th, 19th and 20th centuries. I have already completed a socioeconomic and demographic study of the town of Bonnieres in this area, but this new project will move beyond the framework of a village to encompass the entire arrondissement of Mantes and possibly the entire department of the Seine-et-Oise. I have already done pilot work on medical history in the departmental archives at Versailles, and am having the archives of the Mantes hospital put on microfilm. I would like to use these records to answer several questions about man's relation to disease, medical care and death. What diseases did people die of in 18th-, 19th- and early 20th-century France? Was hospitalization before death frequent throughout the entire period, or did it increase toward the end? What does this say about the beginnings of a scientific attitude toward disease and death? Nor is death the only phenomenon which would be better understood by some work with hospital records. Our understanding of childbirth would be greatly enriched by a close analysis of the increase in the number of women who left their home villages toward the beginning of the 20th century to go to the hospital of Mantes to give birth. My study will focus on reaction to epidemics and to the introduction of smallpox vaccination into this area also. How favorably were doctors received when they entered rural areas in the 19th century, full of supposedly good advice? My work so far suggests that paraprofessional medical workers, recruited from the local populations, had much more success in spreading such novelties as vaccination. In the monograph which I plan to write, I shall consider how all these factors helped push the peasants of the Mantois toward an acceptance of formal medicine.